I think you have a fine rifle, and no apologies are necessary. I don't see that you specified the type of lock (although it looks like a Siler) or barrel, but I'll bet it's a shooter.
I'm seeing the phrase "Ohio rifle" applied to a lot of half-stocked percussion rifles lately. No offense to anyone here, but I would like to point out that there were individual gunmakers as well as gunmaking centers all over the country in the later percussion era... New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, California... and so forth, all making half-stocked rifles. I believe a number of half-stocks were produced in New England, especially Massachusetts, during the flintlock era. These probably would have had English locks, though.
The rifle in the original post reminds me a lot of the old "Astorian" rifles built by Green River Forge in the 1970's. This is not to be confused with Green River Rifle Works of Roosevelt, Utah. They were a totally separate company. Anyway, I never owned one, but the Astorians were reported to be very nice rifles, and there is an apocryphal report that there is an original in a museum in Vancouver (? Washington ? B.C ?) which the rifles from Green River Forge resembled very closely. The GRF Astorian rifles had Haddaway locks, which were virtually identical to the better known Silers, and they had Sharon barrels. The only really salient visual difference between the Astorian rifles and the one pictured in the original post is that the rifles from Green River Forge had a band around the forend instead of the Hawken-Style nosecap. You can find a very good write-up about Green River Forge and all of their guns here:
Green River Forge.
I would also direct your attention to Granville Stuart's autobiography,
Forty Years on the Frontier. Mr. Stuart is generally remembered as a pioneer in Montana, but he spent his childhood (1843-1850) in Iowa. In his book, he wrote, "In our neighborhood was a widow with several children whose husband had been a good hunter. His rifle was a flint-lock half stock, of large caliber for those days, using forty round balls to the pound of lead." Mr. Stuart went on to provide a little more detail about this rifle, adding that his father "... used to borrow it occasionally because its large balls were more fatal to the deer than those of his small caliber rifle." When the elder Mr. Stuart was successful in his hunt, he always gave half of the venison to Mrs. Johnson, the widow who owned the rifle. The point of all this being that half-stocked flintlock rifles did exist on the frontier, and people were still shooting flinters well into the percussion era. Another interesting detail is that forty gauge balls (forty to the pound of lead) would be 0.488". Allowing for a bit of windage, the rifle Mr. Stuart described was probably around fifty caliber, which he considered quite large.
If you find this interesting, I would recommend that you take a look at the book. There is a long excerpt on
Books Google, and you can read it for free. You won't have access to the whole book, but the information that is probably of greatest interest to most of us is in the first couple of chapters, and the discussion of firearms is on pages 32-34.
I didn't mean to hijack the thread... Sorry. Old guys tend to ramble.
Best regards,
Notchy Bob
